Your Life: Wrapped.

ISSUE 7 / CULTURE & SOCIETY

Did you know you have taken over 6 million breaths this year? Wow, you’re a real breather! Out of all the liquids you drank, water was your favourite. Want to know how many steps you’ve taken? Swears you’ve sworn? Hugs you’ve hugged? Blinks you’ve blunked? It's all here on Life Wrapped: a complete round-up of every single action you’ve taken this year.

If you’ve been a regular user of any music streaming service in recent years, this will sound very familiar to you. Beginning with Spotify in 2016, the year-in-review-type feature seems to be a staple of pretty much every service under the sun these days. On the surface, it sounds like a pretty benign concept. At the end of the year, you get a round-up of all the songs (or the usage of whatever service the app provides) to surprise you, fascinate you, and show off to your friends. How novel, how cutesy! A cool feature to round up and look back upon your year… right? Except if you think, even a little bit, about the implications of what this service is offering, and how it’s able to offer it to you, it starts to get a whole lot less cutesy.

Advertising—free advertising at that—is the biggest reason for the year-in-review tidal wave. Every year when Spotify comes out with Wrapped, people flock to Facebook, Instagram, or their social media of choice to preach how they were the “top 0.01% of fans” or that they “listened to 10k hours of  [insert artist here]”. Creating millions of dollars of free advertising for Spotify by simply creating something novel—and by creating exclusion for everyone else that doesn’t use their service. Spotify knows this as well. Their global head of product marketing stating that it “creates this FOMO effect that happens and that inherently entices new users to consider Spotify, so it’s a flywheel effect.” I can distinctly remember pre-2019, when all the non-Spotify users were posting about how they felt left out when the yearly Wrapped came out, with their service of choice offering nothing when all the “top five artists” stories began flooding the social media of their fellow Spotify users.

Obviously Spotify's competitors aren't oblivious to this, with companies such as Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, and Youtube Music releasing their own form of Wrapped, Replay, or Rewind service one by one in recent years. Not only that, but even other services such as Steam, Google Photos, YouTube, Twitch, Tinder, and even Uber (yes, that Uber) have come up with their own wrapped-type service to round-up all of their users’ activity in the year in one neat package. All hopping on the bandwagon of ultra-personalised, user-tailored, data recapping to get a slice of that sweet sweet social media pie.

So why must everything we do be tracked, categorised, and served back to us in a distracting, digestible format, and why have we just accepted it? Sure, it was a novel idea when Spotify started doing it, but is it necessary for Uber to tell me what my personality is based on how many rides I’ve taken with them? Is this really something I need or just a way to add more perceived value to the products we consume. As companies fight tooth and nail for any dollar they can suck out of our pockets, why have we just become okay with them building detailed profiles of our personalities and storing them like commodities to use however they please?

Of course, this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the ethical and privacy dilemmas of the data these companies possess. If this is just what they’re willing to show you, imagine the amount of data they’re tracking that they don't want you to know about. I can remember when Nintendo released their own end-of-year recap, it included data from the years before they had introduced it, for me being back to 2017. Which means I was 12 at the time, and Nintendo was still tracking data of the games I played and how long I played for to use however they please. This whole tracking of data and usage isn't a new concept, it's something corporations have been doing for a long time. It's only now that they’re presenting it as a whimsical way to look back on your year instead of trying to pretend that they don’t do it.

In the end, it all boils down to profit, and knowing everything they can about us to better sell us their products. It's why every single thing we use seems to require an account these days, why everything from your smart lightbulbs to your water tracking app to your fridge needs an email. It's not to “enhance your user experience”, but to have a platform to build a profile on you. They collect your data, your patterns and behaviour, and sell it to advertisers. Then, they turn around and present the knowledge they’ve built of you as a palpable, entertaining anecdote at the end of the year. It's that easy. I’m guilty of it too, it's only lately that I’ve really begun thinking about where my data is going, and what the arrival of my Spotify Wrapped actually means. In a world where we seem to own so little, we need to start taking back control of our own data. Use alternate services to what the big companies provide, buy your own media, support open source projects. Wrap up your own life, instead of letting Spotify do it for you.

Luke Lamont is a contributing writer from the New Zealand Broadcasting School. You can find his work @lukesbitsandpieces.